Mar 23, 2018 | Global Economy, US Economy
This post is taken from our March 6th weekly report. Once again, trade wars are a potential risk, with Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, and other countries responding that they may impose retaliatory taxes on US goods. The...
Nov 18, 2017 | Global Economy, US Economy
We continue to see a higher dollar as the path of least resistance into year end. In addition to extreme short positioning and some buy signals that we have flagged over the past few weeks, a number of other supportive factors are starting to come into play. The...
Nov 3, 2017 | Global Economy, Japan
Much in the way that monetary stimulus has turbocharged equities, unprecedented low interest rates in developed and emerging markets have artificially compressed credit default swap spreads. As the charts below show, CDS spreads are anchored at the bottom end of the...
Sep 22, 2017 | Global Economy
In addition to our usual shorter blog posts, we will be posting a series of longer, more in-depth posts that illustrate our framework, and explain how we look at markets and the economy. In this first post, we tour through the work of Hyman Minsky and Charles...
Aug 5, 2017 | Emerging Markets, Global Economy
The macro-economic landscape has profoundly changed since the financial crisis. Developed markets deleveraged, and emerging markets became the engine of global credit and money growth. The top-left chart from the BIS shows this very clearly. EMEs (emerging market...
Jul 28, 2017 | Global Economy
BIS data allow one to see where foreign leverage is building up, and in what currency. Over half of cross-border banking claims are in USD, which represents a large structural short for the USD. Any financial panic that spreads globally is highly likely to kickstart a...
Sep 23, 2015 | Global Economy, US Economy
Structural factors are ensuring that the unemployment rate in the US today is not what it was in periods past. Yellen has seemed to be more in the camp that the decline in the labour participation rate (PR) since the crisis has been mainly cyclical in nature and...
Aug 27, 2015 | Global Economy, Monetary Policy
Stock markets are experiencing a classic crash pattern. Volatility has spiked and sharp sell offs are often being followed by powerful rallies. As with previous crash patterns, we would expect markets to continue to gyrate wildly for around the next 8 weeks,...
Feb 26, 2015 | Global Economy, Leading Indicators, Monetary Policy
As we remind our readers often, yield curves are one of the single best leading indicators. A yield curve inversion has predicted every US recession since 1945, with only one false positive, in 1966 (although the false positive preceded a downturn in industrial...
